Thursday, 6 September 2012

My first experiments with lino etching coincided with some prints that I did on the theme of Venus. My etching paste was a caustic soda and wallpaper paste mix so I pessimistically exiled myself to the shed for fear of burning holes through table tops in the house. The etching paste actually worked rather more efficently than I expected and not much of the lino was left, but I liked the organic nature and textures.

The etched piece of lino

and my print

After this I had another attempt at the same image but this time I painted molten wax onto the lino as a resist before painting on the etching paste. I left it for an hour again and this time the resist worked so efficiently that hardly anything etched away! It was a very different effect to the wax crayon resist.

Next I decided that perhaps I should do a time trial on a test strip. I painted my etching mix onto the lino at ten minute intervals over a period of an hour. Not quite as scientific as it sounds: what I discovered was that the thicker the paste, the faster it etched, so 40 minutes actually etched less than 10 minutes...

Time to put some of this into practice again. In my next print, of Venus and the crescent moon, I cut away the moon using lino cutting tools. Then I painted the etching paste onto the shadowed area of the moon and left it for just a short time. This gave it a very lightly textured surface. Rather lighter than I anticipated. When I printed it, it clogged up and hardly showed on the print. So I inked the lino then wiped the textured area with an oily cloth before inking lightly again. The oil seemed to resist the ink a little giving the shadowy effect that I wanted.

Thursday, 23 August 2012

When I did my last lino print of this semi-demolished building (blog entry 15 Aug) what I liked best were the simple, single colour images which were actually part of the final print. So in this one I concentrated on the exposed walls with holes and drainpipes and just went for one layer of colour.

After cutting the image into the lino, I cut it into several sections, inked each with a separate colour and then pieced it back together to print.

I'm really pleased with this print and may do another run using a range of faded colours.

Sunday, 19 August 2012

More skeletons of Tetley's Brewery. Each room is like a framed miniature.

In this screen print I wanted to use the shapes and forms of the building whilst not making an obvious representation of it. I like the way that some of the detail crumbles away, just as the building is doing in real life.

Across the road is a row of old terraced houses, bricked up, boarded up and fenced off: presumably also due for demolition. I love this block. Some beautiful features remain and they must once have been splendid but I also have a strange fascination in the pattern of boarding-up materials. Why do the windows all have a white square patch in the middle of the breeze-blocks?

I used my photographs of these houses to create screen prints, overlaying details from one image on another to add to the decaying feel.

The future for the Tetley skeletons: the detailed framed miniatures against the clean lines of the modern buildings behind them. Maybe I'll work on something using the new buildings with their regulated patterns of windows and balconies hiding what is behind them and the old building with its grid work of scruffy remains.

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Sad as it is to see places being demolished, I really love the traces left in the process: the patches of colour, the pipework, the holes. I kept passing this building which used to be part of Tetley's brewery in Leeds and one day pulled down a side street to stop and photograph it.

I made a reduction lino print inspired by this building.

This is a process by which you cut marks into the lino, print, cut some more away, print another colour on top of the first, cut further and so on. This is quite scary when you first do it as there's no going back and doing more from the earlier stages if you don't like what you do in the following stages!

That's what happened here. I prefer the simplicity and sparsity of the single colour prints that I did at each stage to the final print.

Unfortunately I only kept one print from each stage so if you want to purchase one-offs of the single colour images from this demolition series, you have to snap them up quick!

Monday, 6 August 2012

I love reduction lino printing and the fact that once I've cut away more to print a further colour, there's no going back. It was scary at first but, hey, now it's part of the excitement of building up the image.

This was one of my first lino prints, based on a photo I took of the windows of an apartment block in Montevideo, Uruguay. It was surrounded by many elegant, beautiful buildings but I was attracted to the grid-like structure of this building that most people would probably just dismiss as ugly and unprepossessing.Each window was like a mini composition.

In my next print I worked with the shapes of the air-conditioning units adorning the windows. Again, something not seen as attractive by many people but just take in their little sculptural values next time you see some!

In Rosario, Argentina, the top of the memorial to the national flag provided me with a fabulous view of the Parana river, the town and, above all, another apartment block. This one had row upon row of blinds catching the sunlight.

I like the fact that, as in many of my prints, the source of my inspiration is not obvious.